notes from the life of a CSA member

Update on this week’s cooking

I ended up with extra ricotta cheese, and that’s the kind of thing that will sit in my refrigerator until it’s all kinds of crazy colors. To preempt the rainbow of doom, I dug around the internet to find uses for ricotta. Didn’t take long to hit on blueberry ricotta pancakes. We’re making them in the morning. (Ah, the benefits of being under-employed!)

I had the ricotta because of some tomato-basil soup I tried to make last week. I decided it was too strong for soup and too thin for sauce. So I bought some ricotta, and we added it along with some Parmesan and enjoyed the newly forged sauce over some penne pasta and linguine. (I felt really strange mixing pastas. Is there some natural law against it?)

It’s funny the paths you can get led down when you’re cooking. But any path that ends with blueberry ricotta pancakes works for me. I’ve been saving up frozen blueberries for just such an occasion. We snack on frozen strawberries and blackberries after supper but not the blueberries.

Baba ghanoush

I finally got to make some baba ghanoush. It worked out fine with the globe eggplant – much better than with the Asian ones. I used the dry-method from How to Cook Everything to cook the eggplant. But when I went to cut it, I wasn’t sure it was done all over, so I stuck it in the toaster oven for a while longer.

The eggplant wasn’t bitter at all and had that nice smoky flavor. I added garlic, tahini, and salt and pepper and ground it up.

Then I added the olive oil and lemon juice. I did seed the eggplant before grinding. I wonder if that’s better or if it just wastes eggplant. Before we went to the beach, I blanched and froze some Asian eggplant slices. Maybe I can roast the slices and make more baba ghanoush – that is, if the masochistic urge to make Eggplant Parmesan refuses to strike.

We had the baba ghanoush along with sausage and sliced tomatoes. Sausage and baba ghanoush were an odd pair, but they got along okay.

I saved the sausage drippings in the hope of more field peas next week. And I ordered another pound of sausage. It’s expensive, but so, so good! I may go broke on the Farmers’ Fresh online store. I bought sausage (again), field peas (again), onions, and pancake mix this week.

Amateur spotlight

We’re eating our very own tomatoes and potatoes this week. I made bacon, basil, and tomato sandwiches one day for lunch. Sadly, I was out of mayo and too hungry to stop and make some. The sandwiches were good, but you have to really like fresh basil. I’m not sure Chris does.

Last night we had some yummy mashed potatoes. Unfortunately, it used up our entire potato harvest for the year. (Our potato plants got eaten and died last month.) We also had red cabbage and scrambled eggs.

The first step of the cabbage recipe calls for sautéeing chopped onion and apple in olive oil. Well, I’m out of onions till Wednesday, and I had bacon grease from cooking the bacon for the third step in the recipe. So I left out the onion and sautéed the apple in bacon drippings. It would have been a better with onions, but I liked using up the bacon drippings instead of olive oil. Why waste the flavor (and the olive oil) if something’s going to have bacon in it anyway?

This supper was actually my first time scrambling eggs. Chris is the professional scrambler in our house. The eggs were a last minute addition when the defrosted pork loin smelled terrible and had to be tossed. Thankfully, CSA eggs are always a treat and could replace any entrée as far as I’m concerned.

Squash muffins

I finally made squash muffins after seeing the pictures at Kitchen Kung Fu. The recipe is from the 7/22 CSA newsletter.

Ingredients

* 2 cups all-purpose flour

* 1 tablespoon baking powder

* 1/4 teaspoon salt

* 2 tablespoons granulated sugar

* 2/3 cup grated yellow squash

* 1 egg, beaten

* 3/4 cup milk

* 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Directions

1. Combine flour, baking powder, salt, sugar and squash in a large bowl; make a well in center of mixture.

They were tasty (especially with the recommended butter and honey) and went great with leftover vegetable soup. They had zero squash taste as far as I could tell, and I’m not sure whether that’s a plus or a minus. We went through seven of them pretty fast. I’ve got three left that I’m saving to go with the last bit of vegetable soup tomorrow. Either way, I’m glad to have this recipe. I don’t seem to have extra squash much, but it’s good to have an emergency plan.

Tonight, however, we’re having our squash stir-fried. I’ve never stir-fried patty pan squash, so I’m interested to see if there’s a difference. We’re also having leftover field peas, sliced tomatoes, and barbecue roast beef sandwiches. I got a good deal on a pack of deli roast beef, and I’m going to slice it up, simmer it in some barbecue sauce, and serve it on over bread. If we had more field peas left, I’d make the rest of my forbidden black rice and save the roast beef for another time. Now, we’ll wait until next week to have field peas and black rice.